Appalachian History

Sara Roberta Getty (1880-1973) served as Woman’s Editor for the Cumberland [MD] Daily News from 1924 to 1942. She wrote four books of poetry, including Little songs of every day, (1924) and Maryland Melodies, (1930), the latter dedicated "to the Queen City of the Alleghenies and her warm hearted people who to me have been a never failing source of encouragement and inspiration."

Photo: from the program of the Cumberland Sesquicentennial in 1937. Sara was among the Board of Directors.

Her husband, Charles, was not overly fond of the idea that Sara worked. Despite this, she continued her career. After her husband's death in 1917, she moved to Wellersburg, PA where she again became a columnist, this time for the Somerset Daily American. Sara continued to work until she was 88 years old, regardless of the fact that she was hit by a car in 1965 and broke her hip.

During this time she raised her two surviving daughters (her twin sons both died within a year of birth) as a single, working mother. She had help from her family, which is why she returned to Pennsylvania.

To Lindbergh

To one with the vision and courage to do
Each task, and admit no defeating;
Adventurous spirit, unconquered, to you
We lift up our glasses in greeting.

Searching new goals in each unchartered place
Your hazardous questing has sent you;
Blazing new trails into infinite space
On wings that the morning has lent you.

Modest, retiring, not seeking for fame,
Yet the world in each triumph is sharing;
History's pages will carry your name,
A viking of courage and daring.

The Cumberland News, 1938


sources: www.whilbr.org/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=2813&dtPointer=9
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~victagg/47.htm
Davis Anthology of Newspaper Verse for 1938, by Athie Sale Davis, self-published, Oklahoma City, OK


Sara+Roberta+Getty Cumberland+MD appalachian+poetry appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Black Man o' Mine,
If the world were your lover,
It could not give what I give to you,
Or the ocean would yield and you could discover
Its ages of treasure to hold and to view;

Could it fill half the measure of my heart's portion . . .
Just for you living, just for you giving all this devotion,
Black man o' mine.

Black man o' mine,
As I hush and caress you, close to my heart,
All your loving is just your needing what is true;
Then with your passing dark comes my darkest part,
For living without your love is only rue.

Black man o' mine, if the world were your lover
It could not give what I give to you.

Poet Anne Spencer, of Bramwell WV, was born on this date in 1882. Many of Spencer's poems convey a romantic concern with the human search for beauty and meaning in a disgusting world, as well as people's wasted attempts to enforce order on God's earth. While attending Lynchburg's Virginia Seminary Spencer penned her first poem, The Skeptic (1896), and also met her future husband, Edward. The couple married on May 15, 1901, settled in Lynchburg and raised three children.

In 1918 Spencer was visited by James Weldon Johnson, author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), then field secretary for the NAACP. Their meeting launched a lifetime friendship—and with Before the Feast at Sushan, which she submitted to the Crisis (1920), it inaugurated her publishing era.

With the rise of black literature in the 1920s, Spencer began to receive the attention she deserved. Her work typifies the style of the Harlem Renaissance school of writers. She published most of her poems during that decade in the period's most prestigious collections. These include: James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922); Robert T. Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923); Louis Untermeyer's American Poetry Since 1900 (1923); Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925); and Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk (1925).

One of Spencer’s last poems, For Jim, Easter Eve was published in Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps's The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949 (1948). In addition to her writing, Spencer organized Lynchburg's NAACP chapter and opened a library at the African American Dunbar High School. Among the many visitors to her Lynchburg home were W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall. After her death in 1975, many of her writings were lost. However, her strong feminist voice carried far beyond her mountain roots, calling out to women of color everywhere.


sources: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/spencer_anne.html
http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2016/Anne_Spencer_a_poet
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap9/spencer.html


Lynchburg+VA Anne+Spencer appalachia appalachian+history Appalachian+poetry Bramwell+WV

"A Hard Journey" brings to life Don West, poet, ordained Congregationalist minister, labor organizer, educator, leftist activist, and one of the most important literary and political figures in the southern Appalachians during the middle years of the twentieth century. Author James J. Lorence is a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, Marathon County, and served as Eminent Scholar of History at Gainesville State College, Gainesville, Georgia, when writing "A Hard Journey."


"I first met Don West in the early summer of 1983," says Jeff Bigger, author of The United States of Appalachia.

"I was a dropout from the University of California and had just gone through a wild nine-month tour of duty in Berkeley’s corridors, spending more time in jail and at leftist political meetings than in classrooms. I failed to finish my last quarter.

"Returning from a stint in jail for a demonstration in central California, I was involved in a tragic car accident, which resulted in the death of a young woman. I was at the wheel. Still in a daze, I eventually took a Greyhound across the country, and then started hitching and hiking through the South, drifting into the Appalachian Mountains. I was angry, resentful, and adrift. I had lost faith in the power of education, politics or even activism. Don West saved my life that summer.

"Here are his bona fides as I see them: Raised by a sharecropper from the north Georgia mountains, West put himself through Lincoln Memorial and Vanderbilt Universities at the same time the southern Agrarian literary movement took the stage in the late 1920s. But West was no youthful antebellum sycophant; he earned a master’s in divinity, traveled around Scandinavia and Europe to examine folk schools, and returned to the South to launch his own revolution in the mountains. Raised by a radical Republican grandfather in a part of Appalachia that had supported both the Union and Confederacy, West rejected the hillbilly stereotypes for his proper place in the mountain South’s vanguard for independence, freedom, and enlightenment.

"In 1932 he co-founded the Highlander Folk School, which became the training ground for the civil rights movement. As one of the lonely activists in the generation before the glorious Montgomery bus boycott, he went underground and defended a radical black (Communist) leader in Atlanta in the mid-1930s. Wanted dead or alive by the Atlanta authorities, he fled the state and became a union organizer for mill workers and miners in the Carolinas and Kentucky and was often beaten and jailed, often forced to quietly return to work his farm in Georgia.

"Not too quietly: In a top secret FBI file, West was added to a proposed list of dangerous Americans who should be interned during World War II. In fact, one memo referred to the poet as the most dangerous man in the South.

"There were some good times. After turning a small Georgia school district into an acclaimed model of transformative pedagogy and cooperative learning, he returned to the national scene with his Clods of Southern Earth. In 1946, New York publishers Boni and Gaer (Boni had published Ernest Hemingway’s first stories) announced the release of West’s record-breaking volume of poetry. Here is where his secret life began to haunt him.

"During all of these years, riding an Indian Chief motorcycle across the mountains and down the East Coast, West had left a legacy of poems in his wake, as author John Egerton has written, like a phantom revolutionary—poems that unveiled the miseries of mill hands, miners, and sharecroppers, and the hopes of justice and racial unity in the South. His pioneering work reclaimed Appalachia as a progressive region and purveyor of the good life. For a while, he became the proverbial people’s poet, his work passed out at rallies and memorized by miners who had never read a book in their lives.

"Hounded and red-baited by newspaper after newspaper in the late 1940s and 1950s, West drifted into oblivion, losing job after job, called time and again into the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings that popped up in the South with the regularity of catfish fries. In one of the most unusual persecutions in American literary history, West’s poetry was often used against him at hearings and in newspaper editorials. Destitute, he even took to peddling vegetables from his garden on the streets of Atlanta. The Ku Klux Klan added a final touch, burning down his farm and his collection of books, manuscripts, and family heirlooms. After editing a newspaper in a mill town in North Georgia during a volatile period, he even had to flee a lynch mob; scurrying across the back mountain roads, West shot his way out of a jam, when a car attempted to drive him off the road. He finally left the South in exile.

"When I was literally dropped on Don West’s doorstep in the 1980s, he had returned to Appalachia as one of the elder statesmen in their folk revival. He had become the link between the Old Left and New Left activists in the 1960s, and had founded a new folk school and farm, the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia, which had become a hub of activity for young Appalachians in search of their history and progressive culture. His poetry returned to print and sold thousands. His role as an Appalachian historian became more poignant with a series of pamphlets he printed in his barn in the tradition of his hero, Tom Paine.

"With less than 10 bucks in my pocket, I worked on West’s farm that summer. I attended classes he set up for school dropouts and mountain youth in an employment program. We listened in awe at West’s poetry readings and his lessons on the heroic role of mountaineers at Kings Mountain during the American Revolution. 'Remember,' he would shout, 'we had the first abolitionist newspaper, not the northerners,' and then pausing, he would always end, 'and we didn’t burn any witches in these hollows.'"


Related posts: “Poverty pays unless you’re poor”

appalachia appalachia+history appalachian+language Appalachian+poetry Don+West Highlander+Folk+School James+J.+Lorence